“Go ahead and laugh at Detroit, Because you are laughing at yourself.”
– Reporter and Author Charlie LaDuff
It has been a big week in Detroit, city of my birth, and a place once described as the ‘Paris of the American Midwest.’ Go ahead and laugh, like Charlie LaDuff told you to.
My pal down South called to give me his book review of Charlie’s depressing book “American Autopsy.” He is a refugee from Detroit, a participant in the latter phase of the sloshing of migration that transformed the city twice. It first brought the people of the Deep South north to jobs and a better life, and then turned in which anyone with any sense got the hell out.
His Dad was a Detroit cop, and he went to DeLaSalle High school. The Gratiot/Conner area was his turf, just as the Cass Corridor was mine when I lived in the city after college.
I thought he would appreciate Charlie’s book since the opening vignette describes a stop to fill up the tank on the Near East Side that resulted in an attempted car-jack that was foiled only by the presence of a handgun left behind by someone else in the glove compartment.
I am sure the gun was illegal on several counts, but things like that do not appear to matter any more in a town without the rule of law.
My pal told me: “I read it in two nights. Tragic and sad. Such despair is overwhelming. I loved that city and it is dead.“
I am still reading it, but am almost done. I got the electronic version on my tablet and read in bits of downtime. I have a hard time taking it all in. But that is race and uni-party urban politics for you, isn’t it?
When I read that Dave Bing was elected with 14% voter turn-out, that told me a lot.
kwame-kilpatrick-court.jpg
(Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Photo Detroit Free Press).
The election of Pope Francis rightly crowded out the events of Monday in the Motor City, in which hip-hop former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was found guilty of 24 charges of racketeering, extortion, attempted extortion, bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud and filing false tax returns. His crony contractor Bobby Ferguson was convicted on most of the charges, and even Kwame’s father Bernard was nailed for tax evasion.
The tail of how this came to pass is done with a deft touch by Mr. Laduff. His romp through the grotesque ruins is by turns poignant, sad, and surreal.
The dead are prominent in the account. Gang-bangers, homeless and under-resourced firefighters are among the corpses in the city that gave birth to “mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high paying blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale.”
Entire swathes of the city have been allowed to go back to nature. Blocks of homes have crumbled as arson and the mining of metal fixtures have become industries unto themselves. Whole neighborhoods are gone, now giving “cover to deer, wild chickens and wolves. Pheasants can be seen gliding between the high windows of once-grand skyscrapers downtown” and trees grow on the soaring rooftops.
You may recall the slide show I published a while ago from a rented bus trip I organized in May of 2011. It is amazing to see what has become of a great city. This week the other shoe dropped. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder stepped in to appoint an Emergency Manager to see if he could forestall Michigan’s largest city from having to declare bankruptcy.
Kevyn Orr is the man on horseback. There had been some discussion of whether or not failed Presidential candidate Mitt Romney would return to the city of his birth and work his management magic on the dead husk of the city.
You can imagine how polarizing that would have been, and Synder had to tread carefully.
Kevyn is an outstanding pick, an example of “I’m from Washington, and I am here to help” that might actually work.
His day job is being a bankruptcy attorney at the law firm Jones Day in Washington, D.C. He is about to get sole and sweeping power to map the future of the city of roughly 700,000 residents, down from nearly 1.5 million before the great Detroit diaspora of which my pal and I are part.
Gov. Snyder said he picked Mr. Orr for his “interpersonal skills, legal and financial acumen and a 30-year track record of work on complex corporate restructuring efforts, including the 2009 bankruptcy of Chrysler Group LLC.” There is another factor in his selection, but we don’t talk about that in Detroit.
Too sensitive.
Kevyn is upbeat, and he said his turnaround work could be completed in as little as six months, if all the players pull together. Today is his first day on the job. He will have the ability to sell city assets, break municipal labor contracts and renegotiate terms with Detroit’s creditors. Elected leaders in Detroit could lose much of their power, but Mr. Orr said he would be willing to work with those who get on board with his turnaround plan.
Given Charlie LaDuff’s description of the Kleptocracy, I seriously doubt that, but you never know.
(Emergency manager Kevyn Orr. Photo Reuters)
Detroit’s government is $14 billion in unfunded debt obligation, which is (if I cancel enough zeros and divide correctly) $20 grand apiece for the remaining citizens. Through in the additional $57 grand we all share in the national debt, you can see that this is crashing down of its own weight.
At the other side of the bargaining table is the Teacher’s Union, The Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. I for one wish Kevyn Orr the best of luck.
It is Saint Patrick’s Day, and I may raise an after-breakfast toast to his success. I think Charlie LaDuff and my pal down south would join me.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com Renee Lasche Colorado springs